Meet the man trying to bust porn's greatest myths

John Millward’s latest research project, Deep Inside: A Study of
10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers, has been compiled using information
from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers, over the
past six months. He talks to Dr Brooke Magnanti about his findings
and motivations.

Jon Millward has been working on his porn study for the last six months.

Jon Millward has been quietly beavering away on a project for some months. Wait, that sounds rude…. but I'm afraid there's no way to avoid unintentional puns. Jon Millward has been writing about porn. Specifically, the women who star in pornographic films - what do they look like, what do they do?

If you think you already know the answer to those questions, then prepare to be surprised. His results, Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers struck big on the internet on Monday… so big, in fact, the server collapsed under the strain of hundreds of thousands of hits. Some suggested it had been sabotaged. Was it a directed attack at his interesting and challenging study of the women in porn films? Or was it just too much of a good thing?

I caught up with Jon over Skype. "In terms of the 'attack' part, I don't know exactly. The engineers are my host maintained that it was an attack -hence why they installed a firewall script and stuff onto it right away but … a pro at large scale web hosting stuff, said that sometimes a lot of genuine traffic can be misinterpreted as fake traffic."

What could possibly bring a server down in minutes? Only one of the more unexpected and irresistible shares of the year thus far: that in a study of 10,000 US porn performers, the 'average' starlet had brown hair and B-cup breasts, would be named Nikki Lee (her male counterpart would be David Lee), and the racial demographics of American porn are startlingly similar to the demographics of the US in general.

It would seem, then, that porn's 'girls next door' really are the girls next door… give or take about a stone in weight and some tattoos.

In fact a lot of the debate about sexual entertainment owes more to outdated assumptions than information, which is why Millward's trawling of data from the Internet Adult Film Database is a breath of fresh air. In this context studies like this one last year on whether or not porn stars consider themselves happy, start to look more like the meat of the bell curve than its tails. The statistics have been here all along, only no one's bothered to look at much of it before.

"The whole project was originally going to be called Evolution of the Porn Star, and specifically track how things have changed over the last 40 years. But the data for the earlier decades just wasn't up to scratch in many ways, so I softened that angle and made it more about averages," Millward said.

Why analyse porn stars?

Millward's background is in the 'information products' sector - according to his site. "I choose areas of life that have intriguing psychology at their heart and then set about investigating them in unique and hopefully insightful ways." What's insightful about analysing porn stars, you might ask? Well, how about the revelation that by almost all measures, they actually represent a reasonable cross-section of society?

The main thing that seems to have surprised people and driven heavy traffic to the page, though, is the question of cup size. The average porn star, as it turns out, is not a heavily-enhanced Double D, but a relatively modest B cup. What's more, the titles of porn flicks have much more "butt" than "boob"… suggesting, perhaps, that laying the blame for breast enhancement exclusively at the door of the adult industry might be a wee bit misplaced.

How much is porn to be blamed for promoting unrealistic body images?

The database has historically focused mainly on American DVD releases, rather than the worldwide and web-based performers whose audiences are growing fastest now. But the study is still an illuminating examination of the very part of the industry that comes under the most criticism for promoting unrealistic body images. And it's obvious to any consumer of recent porn that the industry is growing more diverse, rather than less so, as production and distribution drop in price and broadband is rolled out everywhere. Like it or loathe it, the women in porn - even big studio porn - are not actually identikit Barbies.

While the women feature most prominently in the study's results, men are there too, albeit more as props than stars. Not surprising, given how low on the totem pole most of the men are compared to the women. "I was very surprised by the average number of women the 10 most prolific men and women have had sex with. I knew there was be a difference, but not of that magnitude. It's the whole 'top woodsmen' thing - a small group of guys servicing a massive number of women."

Other research looking at the content of porn has shown the men to be like disembodied sex toys, often with everything but a torso and a penis cropped out of the shot. There's a surprising amount of whole-woman, shots, though, especially faces - something suggesting that for a hetero male audience, looking at the woman's face is as important as a looking at the body. Millward concurs: "So [ejaculating] on them, or seeing them a lot, makes sense. And facials are so often used as the primary thing that is 'degrading' by anti-porn people as if it's inconceivable that it could be a fun or erotic thing."

Part of the problem with any such study, of course, is the challenge of keeping your own opinions out of it. "I'm not in the slightest bit anti-porn and, even though I keep my views out of my articles for the most part, I think people are just too reactionary and scared about it, and many things in life," Millward says. "I hate this thing about it being 'degrading'. I mean, it's so hard to quantify, measure, and it's bordering on extremely patronizing, to say someone's conscious choice of work is degrading doesn't compute for me."

Fair Trade porn

Does that mean he and others might conceivably support, say, 'Fair Trade Porn'? Some generally accepted way in which we could tell that the actors involved were happy with their work and into it? "If it was hot I would. Then again, it'd have to be damn good for me to pay for it at all," Millward admits. "Same as with the chocolate, it'd have to taste as good as the rest and not be too much more expensive - not that I'd buy an alternative that I knew was harming people like some choc harms local people in parts of the world."

But has being open to watching porn perhaps desensitised him to it? My take on it is that media by its nature desensitises you to something. The idea that seeing naked bodies of people not in the room is somehow more damaging than getting used to communicating with disembodied voices is odd. "Yeah," says Jon, "given that in our ancestral past we would have been in the same hut as our parents while they f****, you'd think we'd be cooler with it."

A book in the pipeline?

What's next? Jon Millward's not in a rush. He describes his process as 'Tarantino-like'. He's considered some ideas, including possibly visiting sex clubs - all in the name of research of course. He's cautious of the possibility such a study might be a bit too much like lifestyle tourism. "I think that's been done to death in women's mags. That 'I'm all innocent, I'll turn up and be wide-eyed' thing doesn't interest me really. I want it to be deeper. More consequential."

Surely the obvious next step is a book? After all, as Cicero said: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." Not a lot's changed from the 1st century BC to now, at least not where social media is concerned.

"I've been working on something for a couple of years but it's not this kind of stuff. It's about sex - well, the psychology of emotional contagion, positive feedback loops, achieving peak sexual experiences through those things. Maybe one day I could collate my blog stuff though."

After a week that has his work attracting millions of hits, one would have thought the blog-to-book brigade would be beating a path to Millward's door. The reassuring myths we tell ourselves about industries that meet with widespread disapproval have rarely been so satisfyingly busted.